Source: flickr
Nice piece today in the Standard (prompted by the British Council "The English Effect" exhibition) elaborates on one of the questions we explored last summer in the run up to my School of Life Sermon: how English thrives through copying words from other tongues
Normally most of us would imagine there's some unique quality (its flexible grammar, maybe) that enables something to spread but maybe in this case is more it's ability to copy copy copy that works.
Really beautiful photographic archive on the New Yorker site of Bruce Davidson's Bobby's Book - a history of 1950s NYC gang, the Jokers.
Like the man said,...join a gang, any gang...
{See also my Best Piece of Advice]
Nice piece in this week's NS about a plan to use a prize to create celebrities of our best physicists
...all in order to engage the public more with the subject and with science in general.
Which seems eminently HERD-sensible - visibility, social norms etc etc
Being famous didn't do Albert any harm...
Nice piece in this week's Economist on Britain's love affair with gambling and lotteries in particular (HT @lauradavies24)
Lovely descriptions of how - in the face of systematic randomness (yes, past performance has no impact on future performance) we twist ourselves inside out to make choice easier - we use shorthands to pick winners (including following "expert" advice or familiar or "special" numbers) And how we ignore the simple rule that the more familiar the number the smaller the share of any (randomly-allocated) winning ticket.
As we've discussed before, herd-thinking is particularly tricky in financial decision-making - you often need to stand back and consider the facts of the matter (however hard and unnatural that is!)
But at the simplest level, those of us who play the lottery - the "numerically challenged" as some would have us - often do it because everyone we know's doing it...
pic c/o Lukas Felzmann/Wired.com
Nice piece in Wired this month (HT Gareth K) that looks at self-organising crowd behaviour.
Not sure it adds anything to the stuff we've previously pointed at e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here and of course here
And of course it provides a good challenge to Behavioural Economics, forcing us to think about behaviour change above the level of the individual (which is where BE stops)
That said, this stuff is always - as G would say - awesome (literally)
So it is 10 years ago this week that I first formally presented what I called the HERD hypothesis in written form (see above) at the Market Research Society in Birmingham (for which incidentally I shared the Best New Thinking Prize). Since then - together with a number of brilliant folk - we've managed to evolve and "operationalise" the basic insight at the heart of this paper, with 2 more books, prizes from the nice people at WPP, ESOMAR and Emerald Insight along the way, a host of well-liked articles and some fascinating conversations and experiences with people I'm not sure I'd have met otherwise.
It hasn't all been plain sailing - I have endured any number of pats on the head ("interesting but not really mainstream"), some strange challenges ("OK for kids marketing & poor people - maybe abroad?") and occasionally some hostile responses ("we don't believe that monkey shit round here" being my favourite).
But gradually, over those 10 years things have changed: not least thanks to the explosion of "social media" which has made arguing for the importance of social influence in shaping human (and consumer behaviour) so much easier (praise the Lord for Mr Z for this at least).
And collaborating with brilliant people - especially Professor Alex Bentley - to turn the analytic techniques developed across the social sciences into practical tool for marketers and decision-makers has been an unexpected but wholly positive pleasure. Back in 2007, we first developed a 4 box map based on patterns to be found in
And now 10 years on, a number of folk have picked up and recycled the work we've been doing (which is exactly how things work and spread), mostly (but not always) attributing sources. So if for example you find someone presenting one of these* over the next few days and weeks,...
...you'll know what to think, won't you?
Yes, the HERD effect is at play...
Thank you all - Alex, Mike O'B, Hugh, Jason, Ray P, Gareth K, Kevin K, Kevin D, Nick K, John K, Alex B, Susan G, Tom E, Audrey, John W, Graeme W, Wendy, Angela, Sair, Mark B, Mark H, John, Fiona, Stephen, Giles, Ben, Geoff, Paul, Liz, Judie, Colin, Chris, Roddy, Peter M, Gemma, David, Bob B, Bob P, Claire, Anne & Merry.
Sorry I can't be at MRS to celebrate the 10 years anniversary but I'm sure it'll be fabulous!
*BTW the version here first developed by Alex & I in 2010 with Anomaly & Sony Europe
Pic c/o Formerwhitehat@wordpress.com
Apparently, it's now official: "Perhaps the most powerful influence on human behaviour is other people"
So says, David Halpern, the supersmart chief of the HM Government's Nudge Unit in a piece in the Guardian here - so it must be true.
As you will know dear reader, we''ve been saying for an awful long time that this is true.
We like and admire the work they've been doing testing the insights from Behavioural Econonics and their relevance for policy making. Some genuinely good stuff here.
However,regular readers will also know that we have repeatedly criticised the focus of much such work on individual based models - e.g. in the landmark Mindspace report.
It's nice to know that the evidence base being built up in UK policy circles points much the same way as we - and so many others - have been pointing.
But I wonder if this means a downplaying of all the cognitive quirks mallarky that dominates much thinking in this space...?
Not until other folk do it?
Pic c/o Bitter Waller
BBC have gone ape with an interesting primatology study today: when chimps and infant humans play the Ultimatum game (widely used by economists to determine real world notions of fairness and equity), both species seem to exhibit similar patterns of behaviour and thus - it is suggested - similar notions of fairness.
While the study does point to similarities, it's worth bearing in mind that what seems to be "normal" human responses often conceals wide cultural variation. Canadian anthropologist Joseph Henrich has repeatedly shown this is so, in bothering to play this kind of game with folk other than Western
Lamalera Whale hunters for example, who depend on each other much more than, say, Kalahari bushmen, tend to make much bigger offers than the norm.
Not that games are wrong - far from it, they're often really useful mode to explore behaviour and embedded attitudes and dispositions- it's just that if we're not careful, we can mistake local variation for generalised truth and - as in this case - genetically-hard wired truths for culturally-shaped ones (and yes, other primates have culture, too)
I've had a number of messages from folk over the last couple of days asking for my take on the terrible recent events in Connecticut.
Til now I've refrained from commmenting because it's incredibly hard to say anything without seeming crass or exploitative of the grief and sadness of those closer connected to the shootings than I am
And this difficulty is exacerbated by the broo-haha in both mainstream and social media.
So I wanted to make just a couple of points:
1. It's well documented that these kinds of massacres spread through copying (hence "copycat") rather than independent choice.
2. The notion of morally or psychologically pathalogical individuals commiting these kinds of acts is too easy a short-cut and often wrong. As Richard Florida points out, at a population level, mental health is not positively associated with such massacres (though for example poverty is).
So, my American friends, if you want to stop this kind of thing happening again there are at least 2 kinds of thing you need to do together:
i. stop lionising the individuals who commit these kinds of acts in media coverage (both MSM and online)
ii. change the environment to make it harder for individuals to have access to the tools that make it easy to commit such crimes (and, yes, this means regulating the availability of automatic and semi-automatic weaponry - the kind of weapons that make it easier to kill lots of people at once...)
As is so often the case, being clear what kind of thing you're dealing with helps develop better responses to it...
Following on from my School of Life Sermon on Originality and Copying, here's a nice quote (HT Alex)
"My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode away ahead of the herd and was sort of the look out. Now you don't have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack in the middle of the herd. If you are, you''l be the richest"
As Faris has constantly reminded us (following Picasso's dictum), talent copies but genius steals.
My review of the excellent Face-to-Face book by Ed Keller and Brad Fay is in this month's Market Leader
[think you need a WARC subscription or membership of the Marketing Society to access]
In a nutshell: a must-read and a useful counter to what you might call our digital over-exuberance. It reminds us of the relative importance of influence the real world and influence online [and as our friends at MarketReach would remind us, Real wins].
Whilst this is in not an anti-digital book, it can be scathing about some of our worst excesses in the rush towards all things coded:
"When the history of the early 21st Century is written, will textbooks observe that internet users spent billions of dollars on 'virtual' animated online farm creatures during the worst economic slump since the great Depression?"
At the same time the combination of clear prose and strong evidence (more than mere collections of anecdote) makes this an excellent and reliable text.
And along the way there's lots to admire:
"The most successful businesses in the future will be the ones that embrace a model that puts people - rather than technology - at the center [sic]...[in particular]they will recognize that people have a far greater impact on each other than we previously realized, and that consumers are not just a collection of individuals"
A must read, even if - as I've mentioned previously - I don't happen to think that word of mouth [what people say] is even the most important part of social influence - it's what we see others do that counts.
It's I'll Have What She's Having NOT I'll do what she's recommending, after all...
Nice piece by the always excellent Victoria Coren in GQ this month exploring (for a male audience) the whole 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon. Here she discusses why women are reading it...
"You can shelve the idea of awkward mimicry; women are not necessarily reading Fifty Shades because they find it sexy anyway.They are reading it for two reasons. First: because everyone else is. There comes a point when one simply has to join in for fear of being left out. But I was the same about getting a recycling bin, and that didn't turn me on much either"
Another example of IHWSH and the People not the Thing thing?
One of the most unhelpful assumptions I come across most when I'm talking about how things spread is this: our assumption that the thing is the thing.
In other words, that in order to spread, a thing (or idea or word) must have something special about it; that it must be something about the thing that makes it spreadable (or "sticky") if you prefer that term.
This works both ahead of time (in our attempts to predict what will spread) and also in retrospect (in post-rationalizing why a particular item has spread and become popular) - darn, are we good at the post-rationalizing success based on some spurious quality of the thing (Subo is a great e.g. of this).
This is such a plausible assumption that for many of us it enjoys the status of self-evident truth. But is it actually true?
Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. And perhaps more often than not in our modern oversupplied decision landscape - where we are faced with too many effectively interchangeable and indistinct choices.
You see, if diffusion is genuinely social - if the spread is genuniely shaped by people following the example of others, the people are as important if not more so than the thing and its qualities in determining the spread.
For example, if a thing is spread by a population tending to follow the example and recommendation of experts or authorities, then its spread will then tend to depend on who those experts are, how visible they and their enthusiasm are etc etc.
Equally if a thing is spread by a population copying in a less directed way (what we've called Copying Peers) - i.e. just following what seems to be popular then again an individual's perception of what other people are doing is essential to the spread of the thing. (this is is an example of what we disparagingly call "fashionable" choices, do denote the relative unimportance of the thing).
[For more details see the 4 box map which lies at the heart of "I'll Have What She's Having - mapping social behaviour"- these two represent the Eastern portion of that map.]
All of which means that if you want to spread something, ask yourself if it's likely to be spread socially or not and worry rather less about the thing thing and more about the people thing,
And don't be surprised if your really good thing doesn't spread or something really pony does become really popular. Where people-based spread isa concerned, it's a matter of bets, of chance and the unpredictability of what people take from each other. It's a people thing, man.
And don't be surprised if your attempts to replicate a success are less than successful. Again, the people thing makes repeated success much less likely than you'd think.
HT Laura Davies Nice Enfield/Whitehouse spoof of When Harry Met Sally as a partner to the classic Women Know Your Limits sketch?
This copying thing is getting out of hand, eh? Download Bentleyearlsadmap
[7.30+ BBC iPlayer UK 0nly]
A few times this week I've found myself explaining how useful most of us find seeing what other people are doing.
And then PING in my inbox comes this from my good buddy Nick Blunden
So I - and anyone else who receives this - can have what she/they are having, too.
Nuff said.
Been pondering recently how and why (and just the surprise of) science becoming a mainstream cultural phenomenon.
Not just the CERN Hadron Collider (much of the tabloid conversation around which was more Sci-fi than science, more crazy physics professors trying to destroy the structure of reality...etc etc)
But also the more general excitement and enthusiasm around science and science-based content - BBC Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage, the irrepressible Prof Brian Cox's Astronomy shows and Dara O Briain's Science club
Some of this is clearly to do with the rise of the geek as a cultural identity, some of it a reaction to the terrible wibbly wobbly irrationality and superstition of the vaccine refusniks, homeopathy proseltysers and the religious fundamentalists.
But let's be honest, little of it has anything to do with actual rational & independent choice.
Most of this - as yesterday's post about Alex & Mike's NYT piece suggested - is likely shaped by people copying each other, not by them making rational decisions based on the evidence. That said, it's a welcome development given the times.
How strongly this shift in attention to science and scientific work compares with the "personal opinions" on abortion and premature birth survival rates that certain UK ministers have expressed (which are clearly contradicted by the evidence).
And in our own part of the forest, with the over claimed certainties and inappropriate precision of so many vendors of what some call "neurononsense", "neuromania" or just plain "brain porn" (aka Neuromarketing).
How delightful then to watch Prof Uta Frith and other neuroscientists on the latest episode of Dara's show (particualry Frith) with their humour, humility and honesty remind us that we're really on at the beginning of understanding how individual brain activity relates to behaviour.
As my old headmaster would say, "mark and note".
Really nice piece in this week's New York Times by my two co-authors, Professors Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien which shows how recognising the patterns in widely available data allows you determine how different phenomena are spreading.
In this case - and reassuringly so - climate scientists adoption of key terms seem much less prone to the boom-and-bust patterns that the general public generate (as a result of what we call "undirected copying" in I'll Have What She's Having or "Copying Peers" in our long-standing commercial business).
So - whatever your personal view on climate change - it's good to know that the scientists don't seem to be vulnerable to a simple "herd-effect" - they're not copying each other blindly.
And, as ever with these two delightful and erudite gents, the prose is pellucid and enthused with a generosity of spirit that I like.
One to cut out and keep.
Pic c/o HAZ.de
Today it's 20 years since (the company that became Vodaphone) sent the first SMS "text" message (c/o a young engineer Neil Papworth, above), "Merry Christma" [sic].
Lots of noise in the news (read this text interview) and on the wires today about this anniversary* and lots of good commentary around the unexpected success of this technology (although much of the US steadfastly refused to adopt it for a number of years...).And much sense spoken about it...e.g.
It's hard to imagine not having access to this technology and hard to underestimate its importance and not just to teenagers - I remember teaching my own late mother who spent a decade in a wheelchair to text and it connected her to the outside world in all kinds of ways (this is also the origin of my "#chocsawayalgy tweets, btw).
For me, several things stand out the success of this technology:
1. SMS was not the best technology then and isn't the best now - we tend to assume the best will win or (after the fact) equally that the winners must somehow be the best
2. Rather, if you wanted to be pseudo-Darwinian about it, you might suggest SMS was the fittest - that it was most suited to the context - cheap, short, flexible, etc - ideal for economically-challenged young folk who desperately want to interact with each other, all the time.
3. This would imply that the mobile telco's just misunderstood the reality of the consumer context and presumed that the high-spending customers (business folk) - that is, people more like how they saw themselves - would necessarily be the key adopters of new technology (a mistake we've all seen lots of times).
4. However, you could also see the relative lack of importance of a superior product as strongly indicative of a socially-led adoption - these technologies are undoubtedly spread this way, aren't they? Indeed, the lack of marketing input to drive adoption (until the telco's had woken up to the scale of the adoption and that very late in the day) supports this point of view.
So if you're thinking about technology of any sort and how to spread it, ask yourself:
a. does it have to be the best to win?
b. is it the people like you that are really going to drive success?
c. how can you help them to help you spread it?
In other words have a good look at HERD and IHWSH again...
*BTW have a look at this 10th anniversary review...
In advance of my Sermon on Copying and Originality at The School of Life (Sept 9th), we've put together at little quiz on copying on Facetube
Let's play along...!
If you're not fed up with Op-Eds on what the Olympics...(sorry just fell asleep there), here's one I did for MIT press on how we learned to love...
And if you haven't had enough Boris today...
So 12 months on from the UK riots, a lot of thinkpieces around in the papers today
Here's one in the FT from the always reliable @Timharford who asks "Why did riots happen? And is that right question?"
And here's the one I wrote a year ago about precisely the same thing http://bit.ly/RkKuvG
And here's me on the Today programme talking about exactly the same thing. Again a year ago.
Not in anyway suggesting there's any copying going on - Tim & I both read the same sources on the riots but if you want to know about copying, come to my Sunday Sermon on Sept 9th
But if not here's some nice boys who want a riot on their own (rare enough for a social species like us humans)
Really lovely piece in London's Evening Standard today on the importance of science as a way of learning and understanding the world - prompted clearly by the extraordinary work done at CERN and elsewhere to discover the Higgs-Boson particle.
Couple of thoughts:
First, science isn't primarily an individual activity. Of course, individuals are involved (and those that get lucky get to have stuff named after them and have stories told about their heroic efforts).
Most scientific research is a team game in two or three really important ways: in experimental science most studies are carried out with other people and in analytic and theoretical science most papers are jointly authored.
Equally, scientific breakthroughs don't tend to come out of the blue - the product of crazed loners or isolated teams. Most modern scientists are part of a larger conversation - that's what e.g. journals and conferences are about.
And of course, the point about the scientific method as opposed to other non-fiction research is that the measurement (and thus the findings) should be replicable by those other than the key authors (otherwise the findings are of little use). Or as Popper suggested, open to falsifiability.
Not forgetting Newton's famous "On the shoulders of giants" dictum: each generation's breakthrough work harnesses the work of many previous studies - often of people long dead.
All of which is curiously designed to stop the individual scientist or research team merely following the accounts of respected authorities (as ancient and medieval science was prone to) - another different social kind of thing.
So when the Standard sub-editor choose to stick the headline "The hunt for Higgs boson shows what our wonderful minds can achieve" don't be mislead: the author's not talking about neurononsense and what the individual human brain is capable of.
Rather he's referring to what our minds are capable of when they're harnessed together (albeit in very strict ways).
Nonetheless, like the man says.
"the bigger point is that it is the most effective way we have to answer some of the biggest questions of all. Science should be cherished for that alone. This great human endeavour has given us the most grand and compelling glimpse of the universe. Enjoy the view."
Nice piece here by the great Alan Moore here about how the film's iconic Guy Fawkes mask has got woven in to contemporary protest movements.
Now the question is: do you think this was an example of independent choice or a socially-shaped one?
Oops forgot to post the RSA video of Alex and myself explaining the big ideas behind our book I'll Have What She's Having - Mapping Social Behaviour.
Here it is
Apologies if you've seen it before - but here it is again...!
Enjoy
BTW here's the book itself
Nice piece from Seth Godin today (HT peter_harrison peter@brainjuicerlabs.com) about the importance of...I'll have what she's having and buying "the" christmas toy:
"...there's no [longer a] mad rush for the "it" gift, the safe, coveted gift that demonstrates the giver was able to finagle a favor or brave a crush of shoppers. The notion of the one, the it, the winner, the safe choice--this is about buying without taking responsibility.
Clearly, there are as many new and wonderful things this season as there are each year, all that's missing is an anointed toy of the year. The masses want to buy what the masses have chosen as the winner, because then the purchase isn't their fault.
And that's what happens every day in just about every market, business or consumer. A few people want to take responsibility, go first, lead the way, be choosy, inquire, find the remarkable, the magical and own the outcome. But most? They just don't want it to be their fault"
Just a couple of thoughts:
i. it's not the absence of mass TV that creates a fragmented and unpredictable marketplace - TV viewing is not as dead as folk like Seth are prone to suggest (though our relationship with it has changed) - but rather the increasing number of connections we have with each other (and the opportunities to see what other folk are having).
ii. it's always interesting to examine the choice of words that people use to describe the early adopters ("take responsibility, go first, lead the way, be choosy, inquire, find the remarkable, the magical and own the outcome...") and the rest of us ("the mass...isn't their fault").
It's not just Seth, we all do it. The lionising and fetishation of early adopters - like Apple's "the crazy ones" - is something we marketers could do with having less of next year, please. It's an unhelpful bit of extrapolation from poorly misunderstood social science. Early adopters vary by market and by occasion and by context; and most of what is chosen by the cool kids never gets anywhere - the legwarmer revival anyone?
Learning from each other is core to what makes our species successful - pretending it's not and that independent choice rules the world is just wrong. And shows how blinded we are by our cultural blinkers...
Happy Christmas, nonetheless, Seth. Hope you have what I'm having...
Pic Herdmeister's own (from kiosk at Weybridge Station)
One of the oddest things about doing the work that I do is the reactions people have to the core idea: many of the behaviours and choices which we think we do independently turn out to be shaped by the choices of others. Looking at some car market data this week is a great example: even I was surprised to see how clearly the kind of social signatures we describe in our latest book fall out of the sales data.
But not everyone finds it so easy to embrace the social thing. For example, I have been involved this week in a long debate on a LinkedIn BE group (I know I shouldn't) about smoking and smoking cessation - actually it's ended up being a debate about thinking and not thinking. It's striking there how some people really do feel that they are active authors of their own lives - making independent "decisions" left, right and centre, like this decisive kinda guy, maybe?
These kinds of people find it really hard to accept that their experience (or recalled experience, most commonly) of highly conscious executive decision-making is largely illusory (or even that they might be an exception to the cognitive rule): in general terms, our conscious minds are (as Kahnemann points out) more Press Office than Oval Office, more sense-maker than decision-maker. And much of the time (in our oversupplied modern world), the popularity heuristic - what she's having - seems to work just dandy; that and recency "what we did last time".
Im sure I'll be trying IHWSH in a moment, when we head off to the pub. Somebody tell me what I want - maybe I'll just have what she's having.
Have a nice weekend, all. Wherever you are.
So now you've got the book - you have got one, haven't you? Everyone else has - and you've dipped into it a few times and maybe pondered what it says and what it means.
Here are some thoughts on what I think it means for marketers that I wrote for Market Leader, the organ of the UK's Marketing Society.
Let us know what you think - about the book and what you think the implications are....
Walked past this today - a memorial to fashion student Min Joo Lee who was killed last month.
Fans of HERD will recognise the phemonenon as a combination of a cellotaph (a floral tribute to a road accident) and a Ghost Bike - which kicked off the introduction of the HERD book
While familiar as an idea, I am still moved to see one in real life.
It's still a memorial to someone who's died unnecessarily.
And a mark of the feelings of those who knew the dead person.
Interesting dialogue in one of the LinkedIn Behavioural Economics groups about how little (or otherwise) the BE movement has embraced the social insights.
We've talked about this here before but one of my dialogue partners has drawn my attention to the New Economics Forum equivalent of HMG's Mindspace which puts "Other people's behaviour..." as principle #1.
However...by my count, that still makes 6/7 of the "principles" about individual minds...improving the odds slightly (down from 7/8)
..just more of the same, then
Pic of the Monolith in Vigeland Park, Oslo
Nice piece here about how certain earthworm species can use social learning and generate something like social intelligence through their interactions (although it appears that touch is essential to this). Not in a scary way of course...
And this piece (HT @socialphysicist) has some interesting speculation about how we got to be more social - the shift to daylight living creating more need for shared security.
Can't help but think of the trouble so many of the folk I've spoken to recently have accepting the truth of our fundamental social nature - of course, we CAN act independently of others but mostly we don't.
Nice piece by Lucy Kellaway in the FT last week about our new book.
Makes the central point really clearly - copying is the mainstay of most human lives. Copying, not independent and heroic individualism, is what makes much of our world the way it is.
While the work of the Greats might on the shoulders of giants, the rest of us rely on the efforts of the ordinary Joes that surround us, too. Me and you and everyone we know (and lots of others we don't) as Miranda July's first movie had it.
Nice!
Last week in Chicago had the good fortune to catch up again with the delightful Tom Fishburne AKA Marketoonist
Regular readers will know how much I love the wit and insight of that other marketing top toonist, Hugh Macleod but am chuffed that Tom had been led to do an I'll Have What She's Having toon since we last met down in West Wales
And lovely it is, too.
Do yourself a favour, go sign up for their regular toon mail-outs. You'll see the world differently through Tom and Hugh's eyes
Pic c/o @willsh
Our new book is finally here and last night we premiered content at the RSA (many thanks to Matthew Taylor who mc'd and Mairi who put on the show)
Don't listen to what we say about it, listen to what John, Gareth And Eoghan say (and perhaps not what this lady whom we seem to have upset - actually maybe it's good to make someone want to "throw your book across the room")
Pic via @mhallsworth and @primedecision
Interesting infographic/poster on the big strands of behavioural economics for those thinking about behaviour change.
Here's the thing: 7 of the 8 strands captured here are to do with the individals and their individual cognitive quirks.
Only 1 of the 8 (handily labelled "follow the HERD", nice) acknowledges that we are social creatures and that our behaviour is primarily shaped by other people and not our own volition.
I'm afraid you'll be hearing me say this again and again over the next few weeks as it's one of the jumping off points for our new book, I'll Have What She's Having - Mapping Social Behavior (which is out later this week). Here's what eoan made of it
Pic c/o digitalhen and BBC News
Lots of noise online today about the demise of Apple's leader Steve Jobs.
A lot of expressive socially transmitted behaviour emerging here and here.
Thanks to Joseph Kay and Tom Donald (@thepunkrockshop) for pointing out the odd tributes left at the stores: flowers, yes but half-eaten apples?
Any more examples, greatfully received...
Finished an article today for Admap with my chum Alex Bentley, which uses - among other things - the recent riots to illustrate how near the surface our [wrong-headed] assumptions about human behaviour are.
Coincidentally both the Guardian and the BBC have chosen today to kick off public examinations into the causes of the recent riots.
The Guardian have chosen to repeat the format of the famous Detroit study into those disturbances and are embracing a collaboration with the LSE and (as they have learned to do from the MPs expenses) with a broader reader base. (They've also done this fab infographic)
The BBC have opted for a more informal town-hall style live event (video or twitter).
Listening to the latter it's clear how easily the conversation becomes too specific - about the particular things that happened in a particular place at a particular time and the particular causes of it. What gets lost is the underlying mechanics of this temporary outbreak - the copying. Too much already is either route #1 moralising about individuals or route #1A big-abstract-forces- acting-on-individuals kinds of argument; too little is understanding this event in the context of other such events.
Equally - as is all too often the case in market research - the individuals involved (in whatever way) are likely not to be very reliable witnesses, either about themselves or about the larger events. This is as true of the Guardian study as the BBC talking shop.
Fundamentally, only by understanding the behaviour as a social phenomenon (and not one rooted in individauls) can we really get to grips with it and start to understand what we might do differently next time. Think about it: a riot on your own? [sorry Messrs Strummer/Jones]
Pic c/o echoblog
One of the most treasured features of most modern societies is the democratic processes we use to distribute power and make decisions about the stuff that matters to us: so important are they, that we often treat democracy as the key marker for civilisation. And as we all know, a number of us have tried to take and impose the idea and the practices on other cultures.
But the practice of democracy is curiously fabricated one (not good, not bad just a cultural product). We go to extraordinary lengths to make it work: fetishizing the "secrecy of the polling booth"; controlling (in the UK, at least) election spending by candidates, banning exit (and sometimes) opinion polls during elections and sometimes (as in Australia) making voting a legal obligation, not just a right.
And yet, it's clear how often people use social heuristics to make their democratic decisions - we vote as those around us vote. In the past this has played out in terms of very tribal voting patterns in Britain and the US.
Even today - as we in Britain have voted on how we want to organised our voting - while there has been some discussion of the relative virtues of the current system and proposed alternative one, most of the noise around the debate has been in terms of "who's":
i.e. Who's backing which option? Who's going to benefit from the vote going this way or the other? Who's a vote for or against change going to hurt most?
Try as we might, we can't stop humans being social
HT Gareth and Katy for this lovely animation of how a line drawn by 500 people one after another changes and evolves. HERD fans who've seen the live show might remember a very silly game I've used to make the same poi
nt [about 6 minutes into this video or right at the end of this one...or after 12 or so minutes here].
Random Drift is the geneticists' term for the kind of change we observe in a population's genes which is driven by a series of neutral [i.e. small accidental] changes [one following another], rather than as the result of important changes in the environment which encouraged the selection of a particular gene over another.
The big moral is this: because we are social creatures who cannot escape the world of others in to which we are born [or indeed turn off our own tendency to copy what's going on around us] much of what we call new or innovative is really just a miscopy of what's gone before - this despite all our efforts at being creative, original and innovative,
Of course, you can tell yourself you are different (and gain some kudos from being seen to be so) but maybe you might just follow Isaac Newton's confession:
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Is our rush to encourage and champion [deliberate or intentional] "innovation" perhaps missing the point?
Nice piece today by Martin Baillie on a subject that has repeatedly drawn my fire over the last decade or more (I was once called "The Enemy Within" or some such by Research Magazine): the future (or otherwise) for Market Research (and in particular the need to move from set-piece to real-time insight gathering - to "bake-in" continual learning to how we go to market).
While I have great fondness for the industry and its practitioners, it has always struck me as more anchored in the past than the future; feeling more comfortable with past assumptions and practices rather than any unfolding dynamic picture - I think that's what Martin is getting at too.
Equally important are the musings of Ray Poynter (the man behind the NewMR online conference in December). His latest thoughts point to the increasing importance of doing stuff with data (analytics) as opposed to collecting data (trad research):
"I have felt for a long time that the days of asking people what they have done, for example in tracking studies, are numbered. I refer to this aspect of research as bean counting and expect that in the foreseeable future this information will be collected from a combination of loyalty card, credit card, smartphone, CCTV, geo-tagging, RFIDs, and the sorts of wearable devices being designed for exposome research (collectively I think of these as part of the electronic wake, the trail we leave behind us). These changes will be another nail in the coffin of the days of surveys (I have previously blogged that in the future there will be far fewer surveys"
Regular readers will know that I'm a big admirer of my intermittent collaborator John Kearon and his attempts to innovate MR out of its current practices with Predictive Markets, Digividuals [a colloboration with the great Bausola @zeroinfluencer] and all kinds of We-research but if you're thinking about Market Research and its future,just step back 10 years and read this seminal piece by the late, great (and round here anyway) much missed Ginny Valentine Download Repositioning Research
(Sorry, didn't have time to big up Wendy, John or Tom but they also have a firm grasp on what's happening next!)
Change is a comin'....that's for sure but not before time...
Insightful piece by Matt Creamer in Adage today which correctly challenges the Klout-kerfuffle about Influence in social media.
Matt's on the money when he suggests...
Influence is not the same as popularity
Influence is not the same as fame
Influence is not the same as the nature or form of our connectedness to each other (and by the way most human social networks are not of the hub-and-spoke variety that the Influentials Hypothesis proposes).
....though each of this can help us understand aspects of influence.
So what is it?
Influence is what makes the difference between an idea or behaviour being adopted (or not) amongst those around us and those around them (and so on).
Influence is often much easier to see after the fact and harder to predict ahead of time than we imagine - as Duncan and others have repeatedly pointed out - so we shouldn't imagine that because something does or doesn't seem to be a driver of others' behaviour that it would do so if we re-played the tapes).
But it's probably best understood as something the Influenced do in response to those around them (as opposed to something the Influential do to them).We call it Social Learning or plain old Copying
Influence is not fixed for most modern human life but fluid - not least because most human life now consists not of repeated interactions with the same few poorly connected individuals (beyond our little closed tribe) but rather of this plus fleeting indirect connections to millions of others and their groups and their connections. Not to mention the fact that most choices over which we permit other folk to have an influence are between equally good, fundamentally indistinguishable options (certainly compared to the few life-or-death decisions subsistence tribes face).
So next time the clowns at Klout start wittering on about influence, stop before you let them shape your opinions...
Interesting study suggesting that the way we copy each other in our interactions shapes our ability to understand each other's speech and thus improves our social interaction.
HT Simoleonsense.com
It's easy to imagine that things are predictable if you could only the right stuff about them. The market research industry's methodological armsrace is predicated on just this thought.
In the music industry, the ability to predict the future has always had real and tangible value (spotting the successful and signing it before it gets to be successful is a sure fire way for labels and managers to make cash).That's why the labels constantly refer to A&R folk as "the guy/girl who discovered/signed X..."
This piece about the UK's Xfactor (whose final was last night) from Hitwise which turned out to be precisely wrong is a case in point: Matt won.[HT @Dancall1]
But it's the thinking behind the approach that's nonsense: we've known for a long time that the way music spreads through a population is not based on the quality of the music itself but on the jumbled interaction of the agents involved (aka random copying). We don't buy/download/vote independently in the real world (online or off-); we do what others are doing - so what assume otherwise?
This distributed form of social learning creates patterns of great volatility that make it genuinely impossible to predict what will win (as in be most popular or most voted for etc). Unless of course, you find yourself (by chance) the winner or runner up (the reason why these kind of competitions do such good business for the labels afterward is that being the winner acts as a shorthand for popularity to everyone else - for at least one release). For most contestents, then, the best bet is probably "horsemeat".
If you really want to improve (but not beat) the odds, then you could do a lot worse than talk to these lovely peeps. Using the power of "We-research".
Thanks to the Marketing Society for reposting this piece I did for their great house mag, Market Leader on the work I've been doing recently on Social Learning
Behavioural Economics fans, take note: you're only half-way there...
And for the rest of you, here's the original source of "IHWSH"
Pic not an ad for the Beatles on iTunes at all...
Nice piece of work here which highlights the mechanism behind so much apparently suicidal behaviour on our streets.
Seems we are more likely to cross the road if someone next to us does - between 1.5 & 2.5 times.
More so for the men amongst us.
But don't worry, fellas - it's only human...
Originally, HERD was just me, Mark Earls, recovering account planner and all-round opinionator. But increasingly, as I’ve discovered more and (importantly), learned from others, the community has grown.
Working with a range of collaborators and clients, we developed tools to give these HERD ideas practical application. Collaborating with likeminded folk such as Dr. Alex Bentley (deputy Director of the Leverhulme Tipping Points grant at Durham University) and Grant McCracken (anthropologist and author of Chief Culture Officer), we’ve attacked differents kinds of problem and found different kinds of solution, thanks to the power of the social perspective on humanity.
We’ve also worked with some fantastic partners – Anomaly London, Brainjuicer, Modernista!, Naked , Protein, People Ideas & Culture and Hide & Seek to adapt our thinking to specific client problems. We’ve advised large corporations (such as Unilever, Bacardi-Martini, Channel 4 Television, The Edrington Group, Sony), UK government departments (HM Department of Health and Central Office of Information) and not-for-profits such as the Gates Foundation, Greenpeace & The School of Life.
HERD started as a label for everything social about human behaviour - a research “bucket” if you like - for the “hidden truths“* of fundamentally social nature of our curious species and the fundamentally social context that shapes our behaviour.
In essence, HERD is a synthesis of the work of social scientists in a number of different fields (primatology, anthropology, archaeology, network theory, sociology, economics & cultural evolution) mixed together with management and marketing science and my own professional experience of more than two decades, trying to understand and shape mass behaviour.
I first used the term HERD publically in March 2003 in an award-winning conference paper which challenged many of the core assumptions of advertising, marketing and market research professionals way of seeing the world and proposed a realignment of these disciplines around the idea of humans being fundamentally social creatures.
Soon enough, HERD was a book (John Wiley & Sons 2007/2009) which a lot of people read (and many said nice things about) then more articles, more speeches and more prizes. But in the last few years, it has become both a consulting business and a mainstream way of thinking about human behaviour for many marketing, advertising and research professionals as well as for those working in politics, public policy and security.
HERD started in the pre-Facebook world (Mark Zuckerberg was still in High School) but has only become more relevant in our attempts to make sense of the human behaviour in the modern post-Facebook world.
*well, not so hidden, more ignored really.
There are three main ways in which clients tend to engage us
I am a recovering advertising and marketing professional who has held Senior posts at big comms agencies (Ogilvy) and radical ones (St Luke’s) on some of the trickiest strategy challenges in behaviour change. I have long been committed to the industry bodies (I’m a Business Leader of the Marketing Society & I’ve sat on committees for the APG & IPA in the UK and taught for both these and the AAAA in the US) and society in general (I’ve helped organisations such as Arts & Business and The School of Life). I am a longstanding Fellow of the RSA.
The path to HERD is not hard to trace. Ironically, for someone who now preaches the ubiquity of social learning rather than independent choice, I was taught (at home, at school, at uni, at everywhere) to "think it through": in other words, not to accept what others told me to accept but to challenge everything until a more compelling, better-evidenced and more workable descriptions of how things work emerges.
It doesn’t always you popular or terribly rich but it is the most exciting thing – as my friend Russell Davies put it, standing at the front of the train with the wind in your hair, it’s such a thrill!
